Samuel Alito Quotes

You didn't grow up in the shadow of John Steinbeck. He put you on his shoulders and gave you all the light you wanted.

My high school English teacher in junior year, Dr. Robert Parsons, assigned us some Poe stories, including 'The Black Cat' and 'The Purloined Letter.' Being an animal person, I had trouble with 'The Black Cat!' I got hooked instead by 'The Purloined Letter,' a Poe story with detective C. Auguste Dupin.

Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.

I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.

I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.

One of my favorite modern American authors is Denis Johnson. I'm deeply inspired by all of his work - I rip him off constantly.

I was fantastically well versed by the time I left school. I had a teacher who put 'A Clockwork Orange' my way, and 'Catcher in the Rye.'

In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.

I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer.

You know, I've read Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' about fifteen times.

I had a high school English teacher who made me really work at writing. And once, when I got an assignment back, she'd written: 'This is so good, Andrew. This should be published!' That made a big impression on me.

I made use of the college library by borrowing books other than scientific books, such as all of the plays by George Bernard Shaw, the writing of Edgar Allan Poe. The college library helped me to develop a broader aspect on life.

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me.

It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.

When I was in school, in eighth grade, someone recognized something in me. She was an English teacher, and we read a play out loud in class, and she asked me to read one of the roles. I'd never done anything like that before, but something just lit up.

I love stories about teachers. For some reason I can't get enough of those kind of stories. If I turn a movie on about a teacher, I love it. I love that idea of an adult influence on kids.

I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.

For me especially, I always need that literature medium.

A top-quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class - based on test scores - by over 10 percent in a single year. ... That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top-quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away.

I wanted to be a fifth grade teacher because my teacher was so important to me and was giving me the education that was going to take me through life and through this world.

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.

My parents gave me that gift of "reading is a good thing." I mean my mother was afraid of everything. But she was never afraid that Judy is reading.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.